Michoacán weekend: 18 murder victims

Warring cartels leave their calling cards: victims of assassination

Monday, February 26, 2018

593shares

It was a weekend of violence and grisly discoveries in Michoacán: between Friday and Sunday state authorities found the bodies or remains of 18 murder victims.

The state Attorney General’s office said the bodies of three as yet unidentified men were located yesterday in an advanced stage of decomposition next to a highway between the municipalities of Puruándiro and Huandacareo.

A further three cadavers with gunshot wounds were subsequently found near the Puruándiro municipal dump in the town of Batuecas.

Security authorities also found a human head that was left on the corner of two main streets in the center of Jacona, a municipal seat located near the state’s borders with Jalisco and Guanajuato.

The dismembered body of another unidentified person was discovered inside plastic bags in the neighboring municipality of Tangancícuaro.

Authorities have also opened investigations into the homicide of a woman whose body was found in Tocumbo.

The corpse of a man showing signs of torture and with his hands tied together was also found yesterday wrapped inside a blanket in a landfill site in the state capital Morelia.

In addition, a young man was shot and killed yesterday in the center of the city of Zamora, while an elderly man was beaten to death in Tacámbaro.

On Friday, two bodies — each with several gunshot wounds — were found on the edge of a highway between the towns of Pátzcuaro and Salvador Escalante near a well-known avocado plantation.

Also on Friday, one person was killed and another wounded during an attack on a road near Jicalán in the municipality of Uruapan. Another person was also killed in Uruapan in a separate incident.

A shop owner in the municipality of Múgica in the state’s Tierra Caliente region was shot and killed Friday while authorities discovered yet another body of a man with signs of torture and gunshot wounds in Apatzingán.

The Pacific coast state was Mexico’s seventh most violent in 2017, with a total of 1,260 homicides, and statistics from the National Public Security System show that 2018 is following a similar trend.

Complete figures for February will not be available until next month, but there were 103 intentional homicides in Michoacán in January.

That figure made the state Mexico’s eighth most violent for the first month of the year behind Baja California, Guerrero, México state, Guanajuato, Chihuahua, Veracruz and Jalisco. Most of the Michoacán homicides were committed with firearms.

According to state security authorities, a turf war between the Jalisco New Generation Cartel and the Nueva Familia Michoacana is largely responsible for the violence.